hacked site

At 12:27pm, our alerts started firing. Multiple ones -- website down, server down, secondary monitoring -- one of our client's servers had completely disappeared off the Internet.

The news was supposed to come out Tuesday, but it leaked early. Last week we learned about three variations of a new class of attacks on modern computing, before many vendors could release a patch -- and we come to find out that the root cause may be entirely unpatchable, and can only be fixed by buying new computers.

Today Microsoft released a patch -- which they had to quickly pull when they discovered that it crashed computers with AMD chips.

Essentially Spectre and Meltdown demonstrate a new way of attacking your smartphone, your laptop, your company's web server, your desktop, maybe even your tv and refrigerator.

This all sounds dreadfully scary. And it is... but don't panic! Instead, read on to learn how this might affect you, your website, and what you can do to prevent bad things from getting worse.

The only thing the homeowner may notice is a slight slowdown in their Internet connection. But meanwhile, their cable modem or webcam was out bringing down the Internet. This was just one of the scenarios described by David Hobbs at the MIT Enterprise Forum.

As I write, we're in the midst of a big Ransomware attack. Millions of computers have been infected, with their data encrypted, held ransom pending an extortion payment or deleted. Supposedly.

We recently had a new client contact us and ask if we could move their sites over to Pantheon so they could do some in-house development work. Of course we can do that for you!